Tech: Self-Driving Cars

Stop. Take a second. Close your eyes. Try to imagine life in 10 years. Do you see robots? Solar panels on every house? Self-driving cars? Last Friday we got a little bit closer to one of those ideas when Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, announced that Tesla will have self-driving cars on the market by 2023. “I think we’ll be able to achieve true autonomous driving, where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination,” Musk said in an interview with Bloomberg TV’s Betty Liu. The company recently debuted a self-driving car in Los Angeles. The model features a video camera to read street signs, a radar to detect other vehicles on the road and can guide itself along the curve of a street. Musk believes that the model could be released earlier than 2023 but it will need a number of years to go through testing to ensure that it is not only as good as a human driver, but better. “We’re not going to wake up one day and it’ll happen,” Karl Brauer, a senior analyst at the automotive research firm Kelley Blue Book, told The Huffington Post, referring to fully autonomous cars. “It’s going to be this slow progression, both legally and psychologically.”